In 1552 Pedro de Valdivia the first governor of Chile, founded a fort, named San Felipe de Rauco or de Araucan. It was east of the location of the modern city of Arauco in the part of the valley immediately on the South or left bank of the Carampangue River at the point where on the opposite bank it receives the of Conumo. Valdivia planned it to be the base for a city he planned to found. The Mapuche destroyed the fort in 1554, after killing Valdivia's insane mother-in-law. It was raised again after the battle of Quiapo, by García Hurtado de Mendoza in 1559. Destroyed again in 1563 it was rebuilt again in 1566 by Rodrigo de Quiroga and became a small town, that remained so without growing until being transferred to the current site of the city of Arauco.
Arauco
The population of old Araucan was moved in 1590 by Governor Don Alonso de Sotomayor to the seacoast, four kilometers to southwest of the mouth of the Carampangue River located between its beach on the Bay of Arauco and the hill on the southwestern side of the place called cerro de Colocólo. The lands for the site were ceded by the cacique Colocólo, and it was named Villa de San Ildefonso de Arauco. However, six years later, Martín García Óñez de Loyola transferred it to its present site, a fort raised on the slope of the Cerro Colocólo and gave it the name of Ciudad de San Felipe de Araucan. In the great Mapuche Uprising of 1598, that followed the death of Governor Loyola, it was destroyed by the Mapuche once again. It was recovered by Governor Alonso de Ribera in 1603, it continued to be harassed by the Mapuche until its inhabitants were forced to leave it in another great rising in 1655. Governor Ángel de Peredo recovered it in 1662 and Governor Francisco de Meneses Brito in 1665. Under the government of Don Juan Henríquez de Villalobos its fort was reconstructed in 1673, and served as the defense of the town until it was destroyed almost completely by the earthquakeof February 20, 1835. It still suffered from the hostilities of the Mapuche in their uprisings of 1723 and 1766 and during the war of Independence in the assault that they made on it on June 4, 1817, with their royalist allies. Population began to gather around this fort and it became the city of Araucan on December 7, 1852. Later it became the capital of the department of Araucan and now Commune of Arauco in the Arauco Province.
Demographics
According to the 2002 census of Population and Housing by the National Statistics Institute the commune of Arauco spans an area of had 34,873 inhabitants; of these, 24,269 lived in urban areas and 10,604 in rural areas. At that time, there were 17,603 men and 17,270 women. The population grew by 17.6% between the 1992 and 2002 censuses.
